Stellar Network Launches $100M Fund To Support Smart Contracts

Stellar Development Foundation, the organization supporting the development of the Stellar Network, has announced a new funding initiative, encouraging developers to build on the Soroban smart contract platform. 

The Soroban Adoption Fund will incentivize developers to build products on the new native smart contract platform. 

A New Funding Initiative 

The Soroban Adoption Fund will allocate $100 million from the Stellar Development Foundation, incentivizing developers to build tools and products for the Soroban ecosystem through programs such as Sorobanathon: First Light. The program incentivizes developers to test the platform and share feedback, tutorials, and code examples. The program looks to ensure that the platform can offer more efficient smart contracts with lower and more consistent gas fees. 

Turing-Complete Smart Contracts 

Soroban introduces Turing-complete smart contracts to the Stellar ecosystem, allowing developers to create new financial services on the network. According to Stellar Development Foundation’s vice president of technology strategy, Tomer Weller, Soroban was designed to counter and overcome the friction faced by other blockchain networks. 

“When we looked at what was out there in the market today, the smart contract landscape is predominantly made up of solutions that are patchworked together, peppered with varying quality of tooling, hard to implement, and, to top it all off, pretty expensive. It made us want to build something better.”

Simplifying Transactions 

Weller also added that the platform would offer lower fees compared to competitors by simplifying transactions and lowering the amount of computational power required to process transactions. 

“We’ve really optimized the contracts to a point where you don’t need to constantly serialize and deserialize information, which is something a lot of [computing power] is wasted on.”

The fee model associated with the platform will offer consistent pricing, which will be based on the computing power required to process a transaction. 

“We built a fee model that you can calibrate because [in] other ecosystems, the fees don’t necessarily reflect the amount of computing power a lot of times. So sometimes you have two contracts that cost the same. But one of them is actually much more expensive to compute.”

Developers Encouraged To Tinker Around 

With Soroban now live on Futurenet, the team has put out a call to developers, encouraging them to test the smart contract service written in Rust. Apart from these tests, the platform will undergo a series of testnets before its eventual 2023 launch. 

“Our development environment is really batteries included, which means you have this local sandbox that’s easy to set up on your computer. We have these basically built-in contracts and built-in host functionality so that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.”

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.